ADHD Nation

A groundbreaking and definitive account of the exploding misdiagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and mishandling of medication of children, and adults, with often disastrous results.
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) will soon be the most frequently diagnosed chronic condition among children, surpassing asthma. Yet research shows that ADHD can't be that prevalent. ADHD, a problem once thought to affect a small percentage of children, has exploded into one of the most misdiagnosed psychiatric conditions. Now doctors and Big Pharma are targeting children and adults worldwide to get the diagnosis and take medications that will, they say, transform their lives.

In ADHD Nation, acclaimed New York Times journalist Alan Schwarz takes readers behind the scenes to tell the full story of this billion-dollar industry. There's the father of ADHD, Dr Keith Conners, who spent fifty years promoting the disorder in the US and pills like Ritalin before realising just what he had wrought; a troubled young girl and studious, teenage boy who get entangled in the ADHD machine and are prescribed medications that lead to serious problems; and the pharmaceutical industry that promoted the disorder and continues to earn billions from the rampant mishandling of ADHD.

An investigation of how Big Pharma and medical professionals are complicit in the creation, maintenance and continuing expansion of the ADHD industry, this book sounds the alarm for UK readers and demands we wake up to the problem that we too could face in the future.

Alan Schwarz is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated correspondent at The New York Times. He has won many major journalism awards, including the Polk Award, the Associated Press award for project reporting (three times) and the 2013 Excellence in Statistical Reporting Award from the American Statistical Association. Schwarz earned a Bachelor of Arts in mathematics, cum laude, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1990.